Surprise, it’s Shizuku time apparently.
What They Say:
“Where the Wolves Dwell”
The Review:
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)
Shizuku has had an interesting role in this series. She has always technically been one of the three main protagonists, but what a third wheel she was. She existed primarily to carry Aya’s head and occasionally have a little spat with Tsugaru. In the big climax of the initial Banquet battle, Shizuku got her own fight in which we finally learned a bit more about her, both as a fighter and a character in general. Since then, her position on the crew has seemed a little more significant, perhaps just because we got to know her in the previous arc. When she lost a fight last episode, it threatened to end her role in the series entirely. Instead, it turns out, that loss had the exact opposite effect, as its aftermath puts Shizuku in the starring role for this entire episode, even more striking because we barely even see any of the other established characters of the series throughout its run.
Shizuku wakes up naked and embraced by other naked women, continuing her bizarre trend of ending up in sexual lesbian situations by no effort of her own. Of course, these aren’t normal women but werewolves, as Shizuku accidentally happened to end up in the very werewolf village they’ve been looking for while unconscious. The fact that they even saved and brought a human there is surprising, especially since they happen to be experiencing the same serial killing issue as the humans and assume a human culprit. But they’re clearly complex characters with their own set of circumstances, and they make a stronger first impression than Shizuku ever did.
In this unusual moment of vulnerability and disadvantage, Shizuku displays a very different side of herself than we were introduced to. She’s usually able to stay perfectly cool and casually put down anyone around her, but she was left for dead, saved by these werewolves, and brought to their village full of human-wary werewolves. Shizuku always seems to get one over on Tsugaru, but while he always manages to maintain his smirking confidence in the face of any obstacles (even more than Aya), Shizuku is completely out of her element here. It doesn’t help that, unlike her two compatriots, she is ultimately just a normal human with some decent fighting prowess.
Still, it’s not as if she’s a damsel by any means. She’s disoriented by suddenly awakening from almost certain death in an unfamiliar land of monsters alone, but after a few moments of uncharacteristic passive behavior, she starts to take action to leave, meet up with Aya, and help the werewolves with her own mystery. Suspected by all the werewolves who haven’t gotten to know her, she has to argue for her life in a setting where fighting will get her nowhere and even her pleas fall on deaf ears when truth is decided by a single (very biased) person’s gut feeling. Ultimately she even proves that she’s learned some things from traveling with Aya and watching her work, as she tries her own hand at some detective work in the absence of anyone even particularly familiar with the occupation. She’s not a Sherlock-level master from square one, but she shows enough potential that it seems like a perfectly viable career prospect for her. As an audience member, certainly some of us are noticing the similarities between the case in the human village and the one in the werewolf village. The former appeared to be resolved entirely too easily, so the fact that the reserve is happening here, in conjunction with the looming threat of a third party, sure suggests a mastermind puppeteering the entire situation from the shadows.
In Summary:
We get a very different kind of Undead Girl Murder Farce episode this time as Shizuku takes center stage. It’s a new setting, a new set of characters and plot lines, and even a very different look at Shizuku than we’ve seen before. Through this isolated lens, we’re able to see a complexity within Shizuku’s rarely-seen vulnerability that makes her feel like a dramatically more compelling character.
Grade: B
Streamed By: Crunchyroll
